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Daily industrial news and top headlines for plant and maintenance managers

PITTSBURGH (AP) — H.J. Heinz Co.'s fiscal first-quarter net income jumped 13 percent, largely on stronger sales in Asia.
The foodmaker best known for its signature ketchup said Wednesday that it earned $240.4 million, or 75 cents per share, for the quarter that ended in late July. That's up from $212.

SHANGHAI (AP) — Chinese manufacturing growth improved and auto sales rebounded in August, suggesting the world's second-biggest economy may not be slowing as quickly as feared.
Two surveys released Wednesday showed production, new orders and purchasing prices all rose in August, with the HSBC purchasing managers index — a seasonally adjusted index designed to measure the performance of the manufacturing economy — rising to its highest level in three months, at 51.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hyundai Motor America said Tuesday it will shift manufacturing of its Santa Fe SUV beginning this fall from its plant in Alabama to one in Georgia run by Kia Motor Manufacturing, a move aimed at boosting production of Hyundai's popular Sonata sedan.
The automaker plans to increase production of the Sonata at the plant in Montgomery, Alabama, said Hyundai Motor America spokesman Chris Hosford.

FRANKLIN, Ind. (AP) — The family of a woman who died after a pallet of bottled water fell on her at a Kroger store in central Indiana is suing the water bottler, arguing a new eco-friendly bottle design might have contributed to the accident.
The lawsuit filed by the husband of 32-year-old Lori Keen is pending in federal court in Indianapolis.

ROACH DRY LAKE, Nev. (AP) — Not a light bulb's worth of solar electricity has been produced on the millions of acres of public desert set aside for it. Not one project to build glimmering solar farms has even broken ground.
Instead, five years after federal land managers opened up stretches of the Southwest to developers, vast tracts still sit idle.

The Mustang Evo is TGW ’s single-mast automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS), and it offers a payload of 220 pounds and an optimum height of 39’, meaning it can meet the requirements of more than 70 percent of all mini-load AS/RS solutions. A new construction makes the new Mustang Evo 25 percent lighter, yet the mast is three times stiffer.

The RCS 2, from ITW Ransburg , is the latest generation Ratio Control System for precise electronically-control gear pump metering. The RCS 2 is ideal for applications where short trigger times, quick response, and low flow are required, according to the company, and the magnetically-coupled meter pumps eliminate maintenance and downtime issues related to shaft seal leaks.

Nederman's WeldFilter is a welding fume extraction unit that offers flexible access, with a 7’ extraction arm, a cleanable cartridge filter, and an automatic filter alarm to indicate when cleaning is needed. The WeldFilter captures fumes at the source, which is most efficient, according to the company — just plug it in and start welding.

It started with a simple but brilliant idea. Ward Dill, the President of Radial Bat™, a NJ-based company that makes engineered solid-wood baseball bats, wanted to forge a baseball bat from multiple wedges of wood.
“I got the idea while tinkering with the branch of a dead apple tree,” recalls Dill.

Time was, if a machine went down, it required a member of the maintenance staff to drop what he or she was doing and connect a laptop computer to the machine to troubleshoot what went wrong. But there is a faster way to accomplish that same task today—through root-cause diagnostic logic built into the software that operates the machine.

The 2010 Energy Intelligence Competitor Breakdown aims to give you a cross-sectional view of what other manufacturers are looking at when trying to make their operations more energy efficient. Readers weighed in on which aspects of their current processes are more inefficient, which they would like to replace in the future, what equipment purchases they have made in the last six months, and their achieved ROI.

Wealth is created in only three ways: agriculture and fishing, mining, and manufacturing. Beyond these three activities it can be argued that all other forms of economic activities transfer wealth, but don’t create it. Many economists dispute this because accepting it would throw cold water on many of their theories about the post-industrial economy.

Officially speaking, Generation Y represents people born between the early 1980s and 2000. According to Dan Boos, an executive consultant to Fortune 500 and middle-market companies, classification is relatively simple: “If you had to put two or three identifying labels on Generation Y, one is a need for instant gratification, the second one is a lack of intuitiveness in terms of recognizing cause and effect, and the third is that they are information technology-savvy.

The King Cobra Series Peristaltic Pumps from Wilden (Grand Terrace, CA) feature a simple, seal-free design that is dry-run capable and eliminates potential leak points. According to the company, this construction allows the pumps to handle a variety of fluids, from abrasives to viscous or particle-laden solutions.

Jenny Products, Inc. (Somerset, PA) has introduced four models of fire sprinkler air compressors for use in dry-pipe systems, such as those found in cold storage areas. Each compressor is capable of delivering moisture-free air, and depending on the model, they are powered by a 1, 2, 3, or 5 horsepower electric motor capable of pumping between 200 and 1,125 gallons to 40psi in less than 30 minutes.

The Wafer Style Type 567 Polypropylene Butterfly Valves from GF Piping Systems (Tustin, CA) have been expanded to include sizes from 14” to 24”. The larger-sized valves feature the same double eccentric design, excellent corrosion resistance, and complete modularity for easy interchangeability, according to the company.

TURCK (Minneapolis, MN) has announced that the company’s line of BIM-UNR magnetic cylinder position sensors has been expanded to include NPN outputs. The sensors are made to mount within C-groove cylinders with no accessories required, and a combination mounting screw gives users the flexibility of choosing a 3/16” Allen wrench or a flat-bladed screwdriver for installation.

Anthony Rowcliffe, a 42 year-old company that has its roots in Peckham, London, has grown over the years and is now operating out of two purpose-built BRC accredited sites at Paddock Wood in Kent, supplying over 1,000 different lines, including its own branded Clemency Hall product. The sites operate five day weeks with a same day delivery policy to a variety of major supermarkets.